The present invention deals with messaging on devices with limited display space. More specifically, the present invention deals with compressing text, in a linguistically intelligent manner, such that it can be more easily displayed on small screens.
Messaging is widely available on current computer systems. Messages can be sent through voice mail, electronic mail (email), paging, and from other sources or means. Further, the messages from a variety of sources can be integrated and forwarded to a single device. For example, a user who is currently receiving messages at a computer or computer network through voice mail and electronic mail may forward those messages to a cellular phone equipped to receive such messages. However, the screen of a cellular phone has quite limited display space. This can present significant problems when trying to display messages.
For example, even very short electronic mail messages, or transcribed voice mail messages, can present text which is too voluminous to be viewed on a single screen of a cellular phone. This often requires the user to either decipher an entire message from the first few words of the message (since that is all that can be displayed), or to scroll down through many lines of text in order to read the entire message. Both approaches are cumbersome and can lead to errors.
While text compression has conventionally been used in many different contexts, the purpose of such compression has primarily been to enable efficient data storage of text. Such compression techniques are completely inapplicable to contexts in which the compressed text must be deciphered by humans.